After seeing some of what was going on in the Gens4Dreams thread, I ended up making another small update. Here are the changes:
- Non-interlaced 240p mode added. I think that on NTSC, ideally, the Dreamcast's interlace mode would match the Genesis's (with an option to force interlaced for displays that don't handle non-interlaced well), but that's more work than I want to do now. I looked at what the 240p Test Suite did when setting the video mode, and tried to replicate it. I haven't actually tested this out on a real TV, so it's off by default. To enable 240p, press Y on the title screen before pressing Start. Interlacing is still enabled in the loader.
- Button map display. Press Y on the controls menu to show the button mappings for the highlighted layout.
The rest of the chances are improvments to the game list feature:
- Precompiled Windows game list compiler included in src/glparse. I don't use Windows, but I was able to cross-compile with MinGW.
- Larger game lists are supported. The maximum size of a game list file was originally 100 KB bytes, with 1000 entries. These limits have been raised by 75%.
- Better handling of non-game entries. Pressing A on an entry with no ROM files specified before would cause the loader to try to load a non existent game (which would cause the screen to flicker). Now entries without a ROM file do nothing when A is pressed. So you can add messages to a list like this:
Code: Select all
Game: This is a message
Game: Nothing happens if you press A
Game:
Game: You can add blank lines
Game:
Game: Altered Beast (This actually loads a game)
Rom: abeast.bin
- Links that allow switching between game lists have been added, so it's possible to separate official games, hacks, and homebrew titles or stuff like that. You can add a link with a entry using this format:
Code: Select all
Game: [[Go to hacks]]
Rom: hackgamelist.bin
Switcher
The brackets in the "game" title aren't necessary, but currently the loader doesn't do anything to make the link stand out on it's own, so you'll have to make it clear that it does something. There's no way to automatically go back a list, you'll have to add a link that goes back. - Added support for a "!" section to the game list index when using the "Letter:" command. It's intended to be used to jump to links to other game lists.
- It's possible to specify line scroll emulation with "Scroll:" entries. Possible settings are line (default), line_a4, line_b4, cell, cell_a4, cell_b4. They match up to the settings in the in-game video menu.
- It's possible to disable shadow emulation with the option "Shadows: off"
The template generator of the game list compiler doesn't support ZIP files. That's more work than I wanted to do, so you'd have to have it run on the BIN files, compress the BIN files into ZIP files with the same name, then do a search and replace on the game list source file to replace .bin with .zip.
Also, the "data" directory in the 7z file doesn't need to be included on a disc, it's only used when compiling Gens4All. The stuff in there gets inserted directly into the 1ST_READ.